Abstracts

The design of tall buildings against wind loads is predominantly controlled by serviceability limit states, since damage is often observed on the building facade after a strong wind event. This is a major structural design challenge, since evaluation of failures to non-structural components (e.g., cladding) is needed. In other cases, wind loads control the design of the main lateral force structural resisting system. In the current practice of wind engineering, performance-based design is encouraged for important buildings, since it provides more flexibility in the design procedures. Nevertheless, several gaps are currently present in today's wind engineering and structural engineering practice, in particular the role of maintenance and repair cost associated with wind-induced damage in the decision-making process. In this study, a novel performance-based analysis framework for tall building structures, located in hurricane-prone regions of the United States, is proposed and introduced. This framework consists of four integral parts: (1) long-term hurricane wind speed prediction model, (2) probabilistic 3D coupled aerodynamic and structural response for tall buildings, (3) wind tunnel testing procedure and protocols to examine the effect of wind load experimental errors on the predictions of building response, (4) numerical analysis method to combine and integrate the results of the three initial parts.; Literature data results, combined with experimental results from wind tunnel tests conducted at Northeastern University, are presented and employed in conjunction with state-of-the-art aerodynamic theory to examine a special loading case on a reference tall building, the Commonwealth Advisory Aeronautical Research Council (CAARC) benchmark building. Furthermore, the hurricane activities on the North Atlantic Ocean and hurricane impact on the US eastern coastline are simulated using random hurricane path and random hurricane intensity program.; The above-described components (or modules) will be combined to build the performance-based analysis framework. The main features of the framework are: examination of wind loading variability through wind tunnel error analysis, synthetic simulation of hurricane path to predict the joint probability of wind speed and wind direction at a given site (with a focus on warming climate), assessment of the intervention costs due to wind-induced damage on the structure (life-cycle assessment).